By LEONARDO BOFF*
The question is not what future does Christianity or our civilization have, but what future does the living Earth have?
It is not only the poor who cry out. The Earth, made the great poor, is also crying out, robbed of its limited natural goods and services. Pope Francis spoke a few days ago about the cry of the Earth and the poor. The greatest aggression against her is not considering her as the Great Mother, the Common Home and Gaia, a living superorganism that self-regulates and combines all the necessary elements to always self-reproduce and generate life, especially human life, the greatest flowering of the evolutionary process. She can barely dissolve the imbalances and still maintain the capacity to feed us and the entire community of life.
Nowadays, however, it is showing itself to be weakened. It is the Earth Overshoot (Earthr Overshoot). It has been overly exploited due to the voracity of some whose project is to accumulate unlimited material goods for themselves without a sense of fair sharing with the rest of humanity. The worst has been happening recently. There has been a decline in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which is worsening global warming with the known consequences.
The rights of nature and the Earth are not recognized, reduced to a treasure chest of resources to support the illusory project of unlimited growth, knowing the insurmountable limits of the planet.
Consciousness grows from the Overview Effect of the astronauts who saw the Earth from their spaceships and witnessed that Earth and humanity form a single and complex entity. Humans would express that point of complexity at which the Earth began to walk, to think, to sing, to be moved and above all to love.
Faced with the ecological emergency, the alternative that is imposed is this: either we take care of our Mother Earth or there will be no Noah's Ark to save us. Pope Francis said it well in 2025 in the encyclical Fratelli tutti (All brothers and sisters): “We are in the same boat, either we all save ourselves or no one is saved.”
Therefore, in the option for the poor, we must include the Earth, as the great poor. It is our mission to take it down from the cross and resurrect it so that it maintains its vitality.
An integral liberation theology must be an ecotheology of liberation, as I have defended since the 80s and as finally made official by Pope Francis in his encyclical. Laudato Sì: on caring for our Common Home (2020)
Fundamental ecological ethics, which support every other imperative, demands: what do I do to safeguard life on Earth and in Earth and to allow all beings to continue to exist and live? The second ethical imperative is this: what do I do to preserve the conditions for human beings to be able to subsist and continue to evolve as they have evolved for millennia.
The Earth establishes a structuring principle for everything, the new centrality of thought and action. The question is not: what future does Christianity or our civilization have, but what future does the living Earth have and to what extent Christianity and other spiritual paths, together with science, contribute to making the future of life on Earth possible.
The ecological alarm demands that we take extra care. In 2023 alone, we will release 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). Half of it is absorbed by plants during photosynthesis and by the oceans. But the other half goes into the atmosphere and stays there for about a hundred years. It creates a greenhouse that ends up worsening global warming with disastrous effects such as the huge fires in the Amazon, the Pantanal, currently in California and even in cold and humid Siberia.
There is talk of a new phase of the Earth, after the Anthropocene, the most dangerous of all, the Pyrocene, that is, the irruption of fire (red in Greek) that can burn and incinerate everything. It would represent an extreme threat to human and life-system survival.
Science helps prevent the arrival of extreme events and mitigate their damage. But it is not enough on its own. We need a new ethic and a new spirituality of the Earth that will inspire us to find a more benevolent and caring way of being here. In this way, the Earth will still want us on its soil. Otherwise, we could disappear, or much of humanity.
This certainly does not represent the will of the Creator nor the purpose of humanity. At the limit of extreme danger we are urged to change. We would open a new path and thus save life on Mother Earth and save ourselves along with her.
We don't have much time. It's urgent to start now, each one of us making our own molecular revolution where we live or work. By joining forces, we will make that necessary leap to deserve to remain on this beautiful and rich planet, our only common home.
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our common home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes). [https://amzn.to/3zR83dw]
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
